Labour MP Ashley Dalton shares her 12-year journey with the disease, urging people to educate themselves this Breast Cancer Awareness Month – and issues an alert over the disease’s ‘biggest tool’
MP Ashley Dalton, who is currently spearheading Labour’s national cancer plan as the health minister at the Department for Health and Social Care, has shared her personal battle with incurable metastatic breast cancer. She was diagnosed just before the general election last year and now, during Breast Cancer Awareness Month, she’s sharing her story to inspire and educate others.
In a heartfelt video on the DHSC’s X account, Dalton remembered her initial diagnosis of primary breast cancer in late 2013. She confessed: “When you first get a cancer diagnosis, it is utterly devastating. I just went into the car and just cried.”
She spoke about the overwhelming anxiety and distress that came from the uncertainty of what lay ahead. However, it was her daughter’s simple words that brought some clarity to the situation.
Dalton continued: “I’ll never forget when my daughter, who was 14 at the time, said to me, ‘Is this the cancer that kills you?’ and I had to say ‘It might be, but this is what we’re going to do to try and stop it’.
“She immediately came out with ‘Avengers Assemble’ which really, I think really captured the fact that this was something we’re all going to have to do together as a family, as a team. The oncologists, the nurses, my family, my friends. You really need that support network because your normal becomes completely different.”
She encouraged people not to fear discussing and discovering more about cancer, cautioning that staying silent on the subject can prove fatal.
She said: “I remember sitting down with my daughter and my wife and we chanted the word ‘cancer’ over and over again to get used to just saying the word and taking some of the fear out of it.
“It’s breast cancer awareness month and that’s really important because the biggest tool that cancer has in terms of its success is ignorance. People not being aware of what the symptoms are, not being aware of how they can get checked, not being aware of what the treatments are and what the realities of cancer are.
“When it comes to screening, there’s a whole range of different screening programs out there. For breast cancer, women over 50 will get invited and if you get that invitation, just go.
“It’s really relatively easy, it’s a little bit of discomfort for a few minutes to have a mammogram but trust me, it’s nowhere near as uncomfortable as four months of chemotherapy.”
The politician had a mastectomy, chemotherapy, radiotherapy and hormone therapy following her initial diagnosis. The treatment appeared successful and she entered remission for a decade, but shortly before the general election, she experienced abdominal pain which proved to be a large tumour. After the removal of the growth, doctors discovered it was originally an ovary and contained breast cancer cells, indicating that her initial cancer had metastasised.
She revealed: “At this point it becomes incurable.” She is currently undergoing treatment at Clatterbridge Cancer Centre in Liverpool, receiving her fourth cycle of the chemotherapy drug capecitabine, as reported by The Independent. Despite her condition, she has not taken a single day off work, although she admits to having to “pace” herself more carefully in her role.
Dalton aims to challenge the common perception people have of cancer patients. Speaking to The Times earlier this month, she said: “When I say I’ve got metastatic cancer, people are surprised. They expect me to be bald, lying in a hospital bed, actively dying. And that might come at some point, and it might be a lot closer than we think, but it might be a long way off.”